What was interesting is that we had to use a valid browser user agent to obtain the in.php file. We used: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0) as our user-agent string. Other similar user-agents worked as well, but they had to be MSIE and Windows compatible so we knew it had to be a Microsoft specific exploit they (the hackers) were attempting on unsuspecting visitors.

You’ll see from the above iframe that the file it references is in.php. Here is the code for in.php:

(click to enlarge)

Which deobfuscates to:

As you can see, there are 2 other files that this malscript tries to load:

load.php (which is actually a Windows executable)

and

pdf.php (which is an actual PDF file that uses ActionScript to try and infect the visitor’s PC).

At the time of our investigation, the malware load.php was only detectable by 2 out of 41 anti-virus companies. Here is the VirusTotal report on that little gem:

And pdf.php was detectable by 11 out of 41 anti-virus programs. Here is the Virus Total report on that file:

Inspecting the FTP log files for the infected website we found that the majority of the FTP traffic on the day the infected files were modified was from the following IP addresses:

89.36.84.249 which is Bucharest, Romania

98.209.145.133 which is Michigan, United States

74.211.69.79 which is New Mexico, United States

85.122.6.86 which is Bucharest, Romania

123.236.139.33 which is India

91.105.112.220 which is Great Britain, United Kingdom

96.20.117.224 which is Montreal, Canada

119.171.100.108 which is Tokyo, Japan

71.65.72.159 which is Ohio, United States

97.84.174.241 which is Michigan, United States

The interesting thing about this FTP traffic from various places around the world is that the exact same FTP username and password were used. There weren’t any failed login attempts with this username for the prior 6 months so we didn’t feel it was a brute force or dictionary attack on a weak password. This leads us to believe that this infection is another case of compromised FTP credentials.

Another interesting point is that the FTP traffic from these various IP addresses happened within minutes of each other and the number of files transferred from each IP address was 2. It appears from this information that the attackers were using a distributed network of compromised PCs (read botnet) to send the modified files to the website server.

This could be for a number of reasons.

But the one reason that seems most obvious is that the attackers know many people try to block their IP addresses. By using a botnet of remotely controlled PCs a website owner would have to block dynamic IP addresses. Would you block a range of IP addresses from a DSL connection in the United States? Probably not.

Having a website means handling traffic from visitors all over the world. If you’re going to start blocking groups of IP addresses, how will you know when you’re blocking innocent visitors? Wouldn’t that hurt your business?

The IP address that d0lpin.biz is hosted on show this for their whois:

The whois on the domain d0lphin.bz is:

Google’s report on the network hosting d0lphin.biz shows:

FIRE’s maliciousnetworks.org shows this information for the network d0lphin.biz is hosted on:

You see that their report shows 2 C&C Servers (Command and Control – the servers hackers use to control their botnets) and 2 exploit servers – both bad stuff.

Prevention of this type of attack on your website is simple. Keep your PCs clean of viruses. If want to be sure you’re PC is clean, don’t use an administrator account for your daily activities. If you can’t install software as your currently logged in user, neither can a virus.

What’s your thoughts on this new attack? Is there any further information you’d like to know? Let me know…

Other sites we were asked to help with were also showing these domains in their Google Diagnostics:

daobrains.info/

safetyshareonline.com/

goslimscan.com/

goscansome.com/

globalsecurityscans.com/

Our scanners were detecting suspicious obfuscated javascript on the sites we were helping with, but it appeared to only be setting cookies to expire the following day. The obfuscated javascript was this:

Which deobfuscated looks like:

sessionid=39128605A531; path=/; expires=Thu, 23 Jul 2009 18:42:32 GMT

We found similar code with various names for the “var” part (replacing oigmlob) above in the obfuscated code. Other names were:

dtxzidl

bmno

wcdg

tpet

stqfpbc

meuhgor

In addition, we also saw various combinations of the hexidecimal numbers to replace the actual letters. For instance, instead of pa\x74h=/\x3b ex\x70ir\x65s we found these as well:

p\x61th=/\x3b exp\x69r\x65s

p\x61\x74h=/\x3b \x65x\x70i\x72es

p\x61t\x68=/\x3b expi\x72e\x73

All of these deobfuscate to: path=/; expires

One common theme was the hosting providers. Wouldn’t you know that a day after we blog about how wrongly accused many hosting providers are for the gumblar, martuz and iframe infections that they actually become the target.

It appears that these recent infections are a server issue and not just a specific website on a shared server. How the server became infected is purely speculation. Could it have been from one set of compromised FTP credentials that was able to infect the server and then control other sites as well? Could it have been SQL injection for one site that then gave the attackers a method to start a process on the server thereby controlling all the websites on that server?

Who knows. At this point all we do know is that this does affect all the websites on infected servers.

How do we know that?

We created a program for situations like this. It grabs a list of all the websites for a specific IP address and starts checking them. On some IP addresses 91% of the websites were showing the obfuscated cookie code from above. Our thought is that since this is an “on again – off again” type of infection, the other 9% were dormant when our program scanned those sites.

Another interesting observation was that for a specific IP address, each website showed the exact same obfuscated code. While websites on different IP addresses had similar obfuscated code with the slight variations mentioned previously.

The first step in this “drive-by” infection was to set a cookie on the visitor’s PC. Then if that same visitor came back within the expiration period of the cookie (24 hours), this would be delivered to their browser:

Which essentially does a Meta tag redirect. The above deobfuscates to:

We did see some of the other domains mentioned earlier in place of safetyshareonline.com and the goscansoon.com.

The whole purpose of this attack is to infect the PCs of visitor’s to these websites. This is done with this bit of social engineering code:

This code uses some fake graphics (okay the graphics are real, but they’re not the “official” graphics of Microsoft) in an attempt to trick the visitor into believing they have a virus. The code starts by checking to see if the operating system on the visitor’s PC is Microsoft’s Vista. If it is, it displays “Vista” looking graphics. If not Vista, then it assumes Windows XP and shows different graphics.

No matter who you are or what operating system and browser you have, this code shows a window that looks like a “Windows Security Center” window and it informs you that:

“Virus (I-Worm.Trojan.b) was found on your computer! Click OK to install System Security Antivirus.” If you select “OK” from their screen it will download their “antivirus”.

If you cancel, a new alert is displayed with this message:

“Windows Security Center recommends you to install System Security Antivirus.”

If you cancel that, it will display again.

One more cancel gets you to this message:

“Your computer remains infected by viruses! They can cause data loss and file damages and need to be cured as soon as possible. Return to System Security and download it to secure your PC”

This is some very elaborate scheming by hackers and cybercriminals just to get visitors to download their “mother lode of infectious code”, but it will probably work on many people.

We decided to show the code here, although the code is inserted graphic files, so that if your website starts being tagged as suspicious by Google with some of the domains listed here, and you get the “This site may harm your computer” moniker, you can compare this code to some of the code you might see in your site and have a better understanding of what is going on.

What To Do

First you need to contact your hosting provider. Have them read this blog post so they can also better understand what’s going on.

Have them check at the server level for unusual processes running on the server. If you’d like, have them contact us and we can help them diagnose this further. We can show them the other websites on your server that are also infected with the exact same code.

At this point we still don’t know how the server gets infected. Be prudent and scan your PCs with a different anti-virus than what you’re currently using. Why? Because if you are infected and you have anti-virus already installed, then it’s obvious that the virus knows how to evade detection of your current security.

We’ve had good success with AVG, Avast or Avira. If you already have one of those installed, then use one of the others. You need to use something different. Scan and clean all PCs with FTP access to your site.

Then change FTP passwords on all of your accounts.

This will have to be done as soon as you start seeing these infections as it may take some time to fully investigate and remediate – so don’t be late (sorry, it’s been a long few days).

Post comments below if you’ve been infected by this or know someone who has.

Thank you.

Friday July 24, 2009 update: We worked with a couple different hosting providers who had servers infected with this and it appears the way these malscripts are injected into the the webpages is through a process on the server. The cybercriminals have cleverly named this process “crontab” however this process runs under the user name “nobody” typically the same user name that Apache (or httpd) runs as.

The file that executes this process is remotely deleted by the cybercriminals controlling it so it just runs in memory. Once the server is rebooted, the process disappears and doesn’t appear to return. The hosting providers also mentioned implementing suPHP as an aid to blocking this from happening again.

This is quite clever as how many times does a shared server really get rebooted? Probably not very often unless there’s a reason to shut-down numerous (hundreds?) websites all at once.

A report released on July 14, 2009 states that “Several successive and massive malware outbreaks caused a spike in malware that was undetected by major AV engines.”

In Commtouch’s Q2 Report available here , which covers the analysis of over 2 billion emails and Internet transactions, they also claim:

“Business” was the website category most infected with malware

An average of 376,000 new zombies were activated each day with malicious intent

Amir Lev, Chief Technology Officer of Commtouch said that for the last 18 months anti-virus (AV) engines used many generic signatures, which were effective at blocking malware. However, malware writers and distributors introduced new variants which are immune to these generic signatures.

This time period coincides with the infection of 1,000s of websites with gumblar, martuz and iframe malscripts which then received Google’s moniker of “This site may harm your computer.”

The Blame Game

Answering many, many blog and forum postings from disgruntled website owners and developers who’ve been the victim of these recent gumblar, martuz and iframe infections, it’s been our experience that quite often the thought process of the victimized website owner follows this path:

The website owner or webmaster receives an email from Google notifying them that their site is infectious. Google rarely (if ever) is wrong so they immediately slap all SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) with the “This site may harm your computer” label thereby stopping all traffic dead in it’s tracks.

Cautiously the site owner or webmaster will try to view the site. They don’t want to become infected from their own site, but their curiosity is overwhelming. They typically don’t see anything malicious.

“How do I find and clean this?” Often these people will post questions on sites like Google’s Webmaster Forums or www.badwarebusters.org or some other favorite online watering hole.

Then their focus turns to, “Who’s to Blame?”

The feeling of many site owners is one of “I’ve been violated and I need to blame someone.”

When hacking victims get to “Who’s to blame”, they quite often turn their attention to their hosting provider. Many times the blogs and forums are filled with postings where people blame even some of the largest hosting providers. Site owners want to instantly spend the time and money to move their website to a different hosting provider where they’ll once again feel safe and secure.

All because they feel it’s the hosting provider’s fault their site, or sites, were hacked.

The site owner or developer will call the hosting provider looking for assistance from their technical staff and quite frequently, they can’t find the obfuscated malscript buried deep inside some harmless HTML code either. Many times the website has been blocked by various anti-virus programs, Google’s search results and sometimes even corporate website filters for days or weeks before the issue is resolved.

Even if the site owner goes through the trouble of moving to a new hosting provider, with these recent infections, their site will just get hacked again and again.

Then who’s to blame? The new hosting provider? How many more hosting provider’s will the site owner move to until they finally find one that gives them that safe and secure feeling?

Many site owner’s want the hosting provider to take responsibility and clean their site. After all, they’re paying their $5 – $10 per month so the hosting provider should take responsibility and the spend the time to clean the infectious website, right? No matter how many times the site gets re-infected.

Don’t Shoot the Messenger

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but, hosting providers had nothing to do with websites getting hacked with the recent gumblar, martuz or iframe injections. It was anyone’s fault but theirs.

It could be the site owner’s fault, or the anti-virus company’s fault, or Microsoft’s fault, or the fault of the company that wrote the FTP software being used.

It was almost anyone’s fault – except that of the hosting provider.

Let me explain.

You see, with all the malware that went undetected by these generic signatures, thousands of PCs were compromised. According to the Commtouch report referenced above, 376,000 new zombies per day.

You could blame Microsoft, however, the Commtouch report also shows an increase in the amount of Mac malware as well. Besides, blaming Microsoft is so 2,000 late.

These recent website infections came from viruses on the PCs of people who have FTP access to websites.

OMG!

Does that mean it could be the fault of the website owners, developers and webmasters?

It might, rabbit, it might.

These recent undetectable viruses steal FTP credentials – usernames and passwords. These viruses search through the files of popular FTP software looking for the file with the stored FTP credentials. These viruses also record keystrokes so when an infected PC is used to type in the FTP credentials, they get stolen. As another point of attack the viruses also “sniff” FTP traffic. Since FTP transmits all data in plain text, it’s easy for a sniffer to see the username and password in the FTP data stream and steal it. We even did a video to show how easy it is to sniff FTP traffic. It’s so easy that some people use a sniffer on their own FTP traffic if they forgot their stored password. Here’s our video.

Virus writers are incredibly smart and this round of malware proves it.

Once the virus has the FTP credentials it sends them to the server of a cybercriminal. This server is configured to login to the website as a valid user, inject it’s infectious code and move on to the next site.

Who’s to Blame?

How many websites did you visit that displayed some type of ad? Did you know that many ad networks have served up infectious ads – unknowingly of course, but nonetheless, the ads could have infected many visitors.

How many websites did you visit that displayed Flash intro’s or allowed you to view an Adobe Acrobat file (pdf)? Adobe had a few vulnerabilities in their software, that were exploited during and prior to this time period. Combine a vulnerability in files so widely used with the ineffective generic anti-virus signatures, and there’s another source to blame. Maybe two new sources – the AV companies and Adobe.

Did you update your Adobe products as soon as the update was available?

If not, then there’s another person to blame – you.

Could the companies that wrote the FTP software used, maybe have encrypted the stored usernames and passwords so that it wasn’t quite so easy to find and steal the FTP credentials? There’s anothe source to blame.

Maybe if so many people didn’t use their PCs with full administrator rights, there wouldn’t be such a virus outbreak in the first place. Maybe these PC owners are to blame.

Whoever you decide to blame, don’t incur the costs involved with moving to a new hosting provider before you find out what your site was infected with and how those infections occurred. You might be barking up the wrong tree.

I’ll tell you, the cybercriminals are to blame.

They’re the people who write and distribute viruses, malware and malscripts.

Cybercriminals (some call them hackers) want to control as many computers as they possibly can. They don’t care if it’s a computer for a university or if it’s the computer of a new Internet start-up company. One compromised computer looks just the same as another.

Compromised computers make up their inventory.

You know what a hacker calls an uninfected computer – opportunity!

Their digital assets are the computers they control. Often times some of their inventory of infected computers gets rented out to other cybercriminals. This provides them with a source of income.

If you really need to blame someone, blame the hackers, or the international cyber laws, or the world economy. Just don’t blame the hosting providers.

Hosting providers provide a very valuable service. Their margins are squeezed tighter and tighter as it seems everybody thinks it’s a great idea to enter the hosting industry. The good hosting providers work hard for their customers. They depend on customer retention and acquisition – just like every other business. They do the best they can with what they have.

The only thing a hosting provider could do to prevent these gumblar, martuz and iframe infections is to block all FTP traffic. Then you would have a very good reason to blame them for something, but you still wouldn’t be able to justify blaming them for the rash of website infections.

It simply isn’t their fault.

Let me know your thoughts on this. Who would you blame if your site got hacked? Who did you blame if your site was already hacked?

What the cybercriminals are doing is finding legitimate websites they can hack and replacing any pdf files with their infectious pdf’s. Anyone who opens that pdf, either on screen or by downloading it and then opening it, will be subjected to this exploit and could face infection.Some websites have various forms they use for reports, registrations or any of a number of uses.

Frequently the infected webpage is designed to open automatically when you visit the page. Rarely will the website owner know they have an infectious website. Often times the infectious website won’t actually contain the malicious code. The webpage will have a line of javascript that downloads the malicious code from some server in a land far far away.

I usually hear people saying, “I scanned my website with 5 different anti-virus programs and nothing was detected.”

While this doesn’t hurt, rarely will this action find the infected webpage because only the javascript code that “reaches” out to the far away server is on the webpage – and it’s heavily encrypted to avoid easy detection. The actual virus or other malicious code is located on their server and often it’s polymorphic – it changes it’s shape and size for each time it’s downloaded on a user’s PC. This “strategy” helps the infectious code in evading detection by most anti-virus programs.

Hacking of a legitimate website is nothing new in distributing malware as I’ve written about numerous times in other blog postings here.

It’s amazing how certain hackings follow the news. It was just a couple days ago when I was watching the news on TV (yes that old, outdated media) and learned that Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr were going to get back together for a “reunion” tour.

The website hacking could have been purely coincidental, as the toolkit planted on his website – Luckysploit, has been used in many, many recent website malware distributions. It could be that the cybercriminals behind this exploit just happened to find this site vulnerable to their recent attack. I believe it’s irrelevant how or why, their timing was impeccable.

This is another example of social engineering used successfully to infect more computers.

Think of the millions of Beatle’s fans (my father-in-law is one of them – a fan not a virus victim) hearing about this reunion and flocking to Mr. McCartney’s website to find out where their concerts will be performed only to find out at the next anti-virus scan that they’ve been compromised by a bank login and password stealing virus.

The nerve of these hackers. Using something so “in the news” to lure millions of people to infectious websites that have been planted with malicious code, appearing to be legitimate websites, for the sole purpose of delivering a virus that is currently evading detection by many anti-virus programs.

Is there no shame?

This attack is being carried out by the Zeus botnet. Yes while everyone was watching out for Conficker, many forgot about the other botnets out there.

It’s easy to spot the infectious malware code in the “source” of the web page. All you have to do is look for something that’s impossible to read because it is encrypted and obfuscated to avoid easy detection. Luckily for us, we don’t look for specific infections while scanning websites. Our systems are based on any changes to a website. We pay close attention to changes that include specific keywords, but our alert system is based on any changes made to a website.

Once again the cybercriminals use a popular event to spread their malware. This particular infection will steal banking credentials which are then sold on the open black market. This is one of the cybercriminals profit centers. They have many.

Be careful when using the Internet, you never know if you’re getting more than you bargained for.

My first review will be Twitter. I selected Twitter because it’s widely used and even easier for social engineering than some of the others.

First a little background on Twitter. Many people categorize Twitter as a “micro” blog. This means you can post short (140 character) messages that communicate your current thoughts, actions, wants or needs.

From their website Nicholas Carr describes it as “the telegraph system of Web 2.0” while the New York Times states, “It’s one of the fastest growing phenomena on the Internet.”

The first thing I noticed about Twitter is that most links posted by members are the shortened version of a full URL. Some of the more populare sites for these services are:

Using these shortened URLs on Twitter allows members to include some description with their link.

I’ve always had a problem with these shortened URLs. Having seen numerous SPAM messages with embedded shortened URLs in order to evade detection, I set out to investigate further.

You never know what the ultimate destination is when clicking on these links. You could easily be led to an infectious webpage. Infectious websites are one of the most popular tactics of cybercriminals to deliver their malware.

I scanned our SPAM traps for messages that included these shortened URLs. I used one of our secured systems to see where these links ultimately delivered my browser.

Much to my surprise, all of the links that used TinyURL.com delivered the following message:

“The TinyURL (shows link) you visited was used by it’s creator in violation of our terms of use. TinyURL has a strict no abuse policy and we apologize for the intrusion this user has caused you. Such violation of our terms of use include:

Spam – Unsolicited Bulk E-mail

Fraud or Money Making scams

Malware

or any other use that is illegal”

This tells me that they’re either policing their links or that they actually take action on misuse of their service – this is awesome. I suggest that before clicking on any TinyURL, replace tinyurl.com with preview.tinyurl.com. For instance if you see a link like: http://www.tinyurl.com/8888, before clicking on it, change the URL to: http://preview.tinyurl.com/8888. The resulting webpage will show you exactly where the link will take you with a link that says, “Proceed to this site.”

I know this is somewhat of an inconvenience, but so is having your PC sending millions of SPAM messages after you’ve been added to a huge botnet.

You see, with any security situation, you always have to consider the risk involved when the potentially weakest link is the responsibility of someone else.

With these shortened URLs, you’re depending on the URL shortening service to provide you with some level of protection.

One other service I investigated, SnipURL.com clearly states on their website:

“SnipURL has a number of operational functions in place to protect the confidentiality of information. However, perfect security on the Internet does not exist, and SnipURL does not warrant that its site is impenetrable or invulnerable to hackers.”

At least they admit that perfect security does not exist, but don’t think that you’re safe clicking on a shortened URL link.

I believe that any free service is going to be exploited by cybercriminals. I’ve seen many times where even fee based services are abused by cybercriminals.

You had better fully trust the person or organization behind the Twitter posting before you blindly click on a shortened link on their site – because you’re either relying on the poster or Twitter. If that little bird in your head is telling you to be careful, you shouldn’t be clicking on it no matter how important you think it might be.

Have you had situations of a security breach on Twitter? If so, let us know by posting a comment.

According to a recent report by McAfee, here are some extremely interesting statistics:

92% of users surveyed believed their anti-virus software was up to date, but only 51% had updated their anti-virus software within the past week

73% of users surveyed believed they had a firewall installed and enabled, yet only 64% actually did

About 70 % of PC users believed they had anti-spyware software, but only 55% actually had it installed

25% of users surveyed believed they had anti-phishing software, but only 12% actually had the software

42% of businesses surveyed dedicate just one hour a week to proactive IT security management, despite the fact that 21% acknowledged an attack could put them out of business

44% of businesses surveyed think cybercrime is only an issue for larger organizations and does not affect them

52% of businesses surveyed believe that because they are not well-known, cybercriminals will not target them

45% of businesses surveyed do not think they are a “valuable target” for cybercriminals

46% of businesses surveyed do not think they can be a source of profit for cybercriminals

Interesting aren’t they?

If you’re a member of the 51% who had updated their anti-virus software within the past week, then you should read Secunia’s information after they tested 12 security suites. In their report it states that after testing 12 major security suites with 300 different exploits one suite blocked more than
10 times more than the next closest competitor – and it only blocked 64 out of the 300!

In the darker forums where we lurk as part of our security research, we’ve seen numerous “how to’s” on evading detection. Many of them are so simple that anyone with just a little computer knowledge could create their own undetectable virus.

Many of the cybercriminal “mobs” offer to recreate their malware if you buy it and then find that it’s detectable by anti-virus software.

If you’re one of the 64% that actually had a firewall installed, how was it configured? If you’re like most people, you have the default firewall settings and you never, ever read the logs to see how people are trying to get in. Most of the people we’ve talked with reply by saying, “My firewall has logs?”

Has you firewall ever been tested? I guarantee it has been by a hacker, but have you ever had it tested? Have you had a security scan performed on your firewall? In the security world, we believe that an untested firewall is no security at all.

If you’re one of the 21% that acknowledged an attack could put you out of business and you only spend 1 hour a week in proactive security management, I’d like to say you’ll get what you deserve but that would be rude and a little – “in your face”.

The fact is, you could be “hacked” right now and you wouldn’t even know it. Maybe an attack wouldn’t put you out of business, but I’m sure it will cost you a lot more than preventative security management
would have cost you.

In risk management, isn’t it true that if prevention costs you less than the potential problem, it becomes a no-brainer to move forward with the prevention?

If you’re one of the 44% of businesses that think cybercrime is only an issue for larger organizations, I have to ask you this, “Where do you think most of the attacks on larger organizations is launched from?” The answer: hacked systems in smaller organizations.

If you’re one of the 52% of businesses that believe since you’re not well-known cybercriminals will not target you, I will tell you to Google the term, “security through obscurity”, or “security by obscurity”. Read everything you can about your adopted security strategy.

Cybercriminals find “hackable” computers by scanning IP addresses. Yes, sometimes, they will target a specific site, but generally, they just look for computers that have openings.

If you’re one of the 45% or 46% who think you’re not valuable to a cybercriminal, answer me this, “Do you turn your back on smaller sources of income?”

Hackers hack for money. Gone are the days when they would hack strictly to create havoc. They now make money from their craft. In some cybergangs, it’s believed that the money they make from one income stream is $150,000,000 (that’s right million).

Just as you might find every email address on your list valuable, they too find every computer that they control valuable. To you, the money is in the list. To cybercriminals, the money is in their botnet (their network of remotely controlled computers). Every controlled computer, whether a server or a PC,
is important to them.

I still find that one of the easiest ways for hackers to deface or hack a website is by logging in as you. They infect as many computers as possible. Then when you login to your website, they record your credentials and then just login as you. It’s that simple. How do they find your computer to infect it in the first place?

They don’t know who you are or where you live. They just hack as many computers as they can and the odds are, with so many people starting web based businesses, that some of the computers they infect will belong to people who own one or more websites.

It really is that simple.

If you still think you’re safe online, then keep doing what you’ve always done and you’ll keep getting what you’ve always gotten – whether you know it or not.